Twitter rolls out ‘while you were away’ for some users

Social media is all about user engagement and Twitter wants to increase it with the launch of its ‘while you were away’ feature for some accounts. This feature aims to recap important tweets users may have missed since their last login. During its Analyst day last year in November, Twitter announced that it would soon roll out features to enhance its user engagement. ‘While you were away’ is one of those user engagement features, which has reportedly been spotted by many Twitter users.

This new Twitter feature is very much similar to Facebook‘s news stream feature, where we get to see important updates from people we follow. The company in a blog post titled “Coming soon to Twitter” explains the new feature “Ultimately, we believe there is something for everyone at any time on Twitter, and we want to make finding your niche simple from the start”.

The company’s blog post makes it very clear that the tweets will be populated based on one’s interests and area of interest or niche. This feature will therefore immensely help people easily sort out meaningful tweets, out of the sea of tweets being posted on their home page. ‘While you were away’ feature has been rolled out to significant number of twitter accounts and full blown roll out appears to be just around the corner.

Some Twitter account owners claim to be using ‘while you were way’ feature since as early as first week of December. A quick Twitter search for “while you were away’ reveals that the feature indeed has been rolled out to significant number of users. A report by tech blog Techcrunch claims that “The algorithm that Twitter uses to source your ‘best’ tweets from your friends is crucial to its success,”